power and persecutions of the emperor. But his Council opposed this policy strenuously, declaring that the surrender of Boulogne would entail infinite disgrace upon England. They rather recommended entrusting Boulogne to the keeping of the emperor, and distracting the Scots by offering the crown to Arran. They argued that Edward VI. would then have leisure to cultivate his resources and prepare for the events of the future. Accordingly, Sir William was sent to Brussels, where the emperor was holding his Court, to assist Sir Philip Hoby, the British ambassador, in this negotiation. But the French king had now made a successful approach to the walls of Boulogne; and Charles, deeming the possession of that fortress very doubtful, declined the engagement, and the treaty fell through.
Henry of France had fallen suddenly on the Bolonois, taken the castles of Sallaquo, Blackness, and Ambletouse, and endeavoured to surprise Boulonburg, but failed: the garrison of Boulonburg, however, deeming it untenable after the surrender of the other fortresses, destroyed the works and retired to Boulogne. Henry II. pushed on and laid siege to Boulogne; but the autumn proved excessively rainy: a distemper broke out amongst his soldiers, and he was compelled to withdraw to Paris. Still he left the command of the army to Gaspar de Coligny, Lord of Chatillon, afterwards renowned as Admiral Coligny, with orders to renew the siege as early as possible in the spring. Coligny did not wait altogether for spring, but made several attempts against it during the winter; and unless the English sent a commanding force to support it, it was evident that it must fall in the next season. An attempt was also made by Strozzi, the commander of the French fleet, to invade Jersey; but he found an English fleet already there, and withdrew.
Circumstances were now fast environing the Protector with danger. The feebleness of his government, his total want of success both in Scotland and France, emboldened his enemies, who had become numerous and determined from the arrogance of his manners and his endeavours to check the enclosures of the aristocracy. Henry VIII. had never drawn any signal advantages from his hostile expeditions; but the forces which he collected and the determined character of the man impressed his foreign foes with a dread of him. It was evident that the neighbouring nations had learned the weakness of, and, therefore, despised Somerset. He had driven the Queen of Scots into the hands of the French, and they had driven him out of the country. He was on the very verge of losing Boulogne, which Henry had prided himself so much in conquering. At home the whole country had been thrown into a state of anarchy and insubordination by the reforms in religion, of which he was the avowed patron, and in the meantime he had allowed another to reap the honour of restoring order.
It was intended that the Protector himself should have proceeded against the rebels; but probably he thought he who had encouraged them to pull down the enclosures would appear with a very bad grace against them to punish them for doing it. Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was therefore selected for this office—a man quite as ambitious, quite as unprincipled, and far more daring than Somerset. In the campaign in Scotland, and especially at the battle of Pinkie, Warwick had appeared the real achiever of victory, and now he was suffered to reap the easily-won distinction of suppressing the rebels. He returned from Norfolk like a victor, and his reputation rose remarkably from that moment. He was looked up to as the able and successful man, and his ambitious views were warmly seconded by the wily old ex-chancellor, Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who hated Somerset for having dismissed him from office, and for a time banished him from the Council. He now took up Warwick as a very promising instrument for his revenge. He flattered him with the idea that he was the only man to restore the credit and peace of the nation. "He showed him," says Burnet, "that he had really got all those victories for which the Protector triumphed: he had won the battle of Pinkie, near Musselburgh, and had subdued the rebels in Norfolk; and, as he had before defeated the French, so, if he were sent over thither, new triumphs would follow him. But it was below him to be second to any, so he engaged him to quarrel in everything with the Protector, all whose many motions were ascribed to fear or dulness."
Nor was it Warwick alone that Southampton stimulated to enmity against Somerset. He had arguments adapted to all; and where he found any seeming resolved to stand by the Protector, he would significantly ask what friendship they hoped from a man who had murdered his own brother. There required little rhetoric to influence the old nobility against Somerset, and his hostility to the enclosures had raised him a host of enemies amongst the new, who should be his natural friends. The people he had lost favour with, from his total want of success against the enemies of the country, and if there were any whom all these causes had not alienated, these were disgusted with his insolence and rapacity. He had bargained for large slices from the manors of bishoprics and cathedrals as the price of promotion to the clergy. He had obtained from the puppet king in his hands, grants of extensive church lands for his services in Scotland, services which now were worse than null; and in the patent which invested him with these lands, drawn up under his own eye, he had himself styled "Duke of Somerset, by the grace of God," as if he were a king. He was accused of having sold many of the chantry lands to his friends at nominal prices, because he obtained a heavy premium upon the transaction; but what more than all shocked the public sense of religious decorum was that he had erected for himself a splendid palace in the Strand, where the one called from him Somerset House now stands, and had spared no outrage upon public rights and decencies in its erection. Not only private houses, but public buildings, and those of the most sacred character, had been displaced to make room for his proud mansion. To clear the ground for its site, and to procure materials for its building, he pulled down three episcopal houses and two churches on the spot, St. Mary's and a church of St. John of Jerusalem, also a chapel, a cloister, and a charnel-house in St. Paul's Churchyard, and he carted away the remains of the dead by whole loads, and threw them into a pit in Bloomsbury. When he attempted to pull down St. Margaret's Church in Westminster, for the stones, the parishioners rose in tumult, and drove his men away. Whatever pretences
